For Episode 11– our first Christmas episode!– I am joined by Dr. David Gunkel to talk about the possibility of virtual moral agents, the seriousness of online games, science fiction’s bad politics, and “USS Callister” (Episode 1, Season 4 of Black Mirror), which first premiered in 2017.
This episode’s guest, David Gunkel, is Professor of Media Studies at Northern Illinois University, where he specializes in the ethics of emerging technologies. He is the managing editor and co-founder of The International Journal of Žižek Studies and the co-editor of the Indiana University Press series Digital Game Studies. He is the author of Hacking Cyberspace (Westview Press, 2001), Thinking Otherwise: Philosophy, Communication, Technology (Purdue UP, 2007), The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics (MIT Press, 2012), Of Remixology: Ethics and Aesthetics after Remix (MIT Press, 2016), Transgressions 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2011), Gaming the System: Deconstructing Video Games, Gaming Systems, and the Virtual World (Indiana UP, 2018), Robot Rights (MIT Press, 2018), How To Survive a Robot Invasion (Routledge, 2019), and An Introduction to Communication and Artificial Intelligence (Polity Books, 2020). David is also the author of scores of academic articles, book chapters, and edited volumes (which you can check out on the “Research” page of his website here) and a great person to follow on Twitter (@David_Gunkel).
Here at BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, we assume that everyone is already committed to read more, write more, think more, and be more… so here’s a helpful list of links to thinkers, technologies, books, and articles referenced in this episode:
- What is an “avatar“?
- What is a “MMOG“?
- What is a gaming “mod“?
- Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace” (Village Voice, 2005)
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
- Aristotle, Poetics
- John Danaher, “Robots, AI, and the Moral Culture of Patiency”
- UNICEF, “Cyberbullying: what is it and how to stop it”
- Nick Statt, “In Black Mirror’s USS Callister, the true villains are real-world tech moguls” (The Verge, 2018)
- Leigh M. Johnson, “It’s A Man’s, Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World: On Black Mirror‘s USS Callister”
- Every woman Captain Kirk kisses on Star Trek
- Karel Capek, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robot)
- Lena Felton, “The history of gender and sexuality in science fiction” (2019)
- What is an “internet troll“?